The Extra's Rebellion
Chapter 72: Depression

Chapter 72: Depression

The cracking of her skin receded like ice melting under fire. Her breath came in sharp, panicked bursts as the effects of the pill dulled—temporarily. But the damage had already begun.

Her complexion bleached unnaturally pale, veins threading beneath her skin like thin black ink. Then her irises drained of color—no longer black, but void. Blank. Blind.

"I can’t see!!!" Kola shrieked, her voice ragged with hysteria. "Somebody help—I can’t see!!"

Her fingers trembled, then clawed at her own face in frantic disbelief. Nails tore into the delicate skin around her sockets, blood flowing from across her chalk-white cheeks.

Blood splattered everywhere, she screamed like a death knell as the sound of flesh tearing rang out in the forest.

Zephyr flinched—but not from her cries. As soon as Kola deceleration of being blind rang out, Zephyr started to have depressive thoughts.

"Remove your eyes... Eat them... Pop them... Pluck them out...

They weren’t words exactly. They were sensations disguised as thoughts—voices soaked in despair, old and venomous, coiling around his mind like smoke.

He stumbled backward, gripping his skull. "No. No, no!!" he gasped through clenched teeth. But they didn’t stop.

"She doesn’t need hers anymore. Why should you?"

His breathing quickened, vision dimming. He looked down—only to see his hands moving without permission, drifting toward his face like puppets on frayed string. He fought them, muscles trembling with resistance—but they moved anyway. His fingers hovered over his eyes.

The voices screamed louder, all around him, inside him—right next to his ear and yet deeper than bone.

"Kill yourself. Nobody wants you. Not your father, not your clan, not even the world."

His arms quivered. He tried to scream, but only a cracked breath escaped.

"You think anyone would notice if you were gone?"

"You think that apology mattered?"

"You weren’t loved. You were tolerated."

"They kept you around because it was convenient. A mistake wrapped in flesh."

The world around him dimmed like dying embers.

"Your mother’s dead. She was the only one who might’ve cared. But even she gave up on you the moment she left this world."

Zephyr’s knees gave out. He fell to the earth, a puppet of despair, his soul drowning in an abyss of voices that all sounded too familiar—like distorted echoes of everything he’d feared in silence.

His gun was suddenly in his hand. He didn’t remember drawing it. His finger was on the trigger. He didn’t remember moving it. But he didn’t fight it anymore.

His lips parted as his vision blurred—not from tears, but from something worse. Acceptance.

’Yes. I can finally see her again. I’m coming home, Mother.’

A broken smile crept across his face as he stared at the sky, wide-eyed and vacant, as if some light waited for him above the clouds.

The barrel pressed to his temple but before he could pull the trigger, something crashed into him. Weight. Movement. Flesh. Nails.

Kola.

She tackled him to the ground like a beast, her shriek inhuman.

Her presence was different—wrong. The aura around her was suffocating, as if sorrow itself had become physical. The plants around them had shriveled. Trees drooped and cracked as if dying from grief. The wind had gone still.

And Zephyr, now pinned beneath her, was still trying to raise the gun to his own head.

"I’LL RIP YOUR EYES OUT!!" Kola howled, her fingers twitching toward his face, blood still caked beneath her nails, her blind eyes wide with madness.

Her bloodied fingers moved with blood red light, her fingernails enclosed behind one of Zephyr eyes.

Gluck.

A wet pop.

His vision twisted. Pain flared—no, exploded—in his skull as his right eye was torn free.

Kola laughed, holding the bloody orb in her palm like a treasure, whispering to the sky in madness.

But Zephyr’s mind wasn’t in the pain, instead his arm that was trapped under his body moved upwards and moved straight at Kola’s head. Not because of the pain, not because he had gained clarity. But because he wanted to clear the obstacle holding him back from taking his own life.

Bang.

Kola’s head exploded as chunks of flesh rained down in silence.

And with her death—the Aura lifted. Like clouds parting from a choked sky, the pressure broke.

The voices stopped.

Zephyr was alone.

Alone—with his gun. With his eye gone. With a corpse on his chest. With the sight of his own eye lying meters away, staring at nothing.

And then came the scream—shriveled, broken, real.

A shriek wrenched from somewhere deeper than his lungs. The sound of a glass fracturing as his wind pipe tore from the force of the scream.

His body shook uncontrollably. As he screamed again.

"My eye. It’s right there!! Lying on the floor!! my eye!!.

Zephyr pushed the corpse from his chest with a trembling arm, bile rising in his throat as he scrambled toward the bloodied orb lying in the dirt.

"My eye," he croaked. "It’s right here—I’m staring at my eye!!"

His voice cracked into shrill hysteria.

He snatched the torn organ from the grass, cradling it with hands slick in blood—his blood—and brought it toward his empty socket, as if sheer desperation could undo the damage. Like a madman, he pressed it in. The pupil rolled inward. The iris tilted to the wrong side, staring into his skull. It slipped, wet and useless.

"Fix it... I can still fix it," he whispered through cracked lips.

And then—he began to weave.

Aether, trembling and erratic, spun from his fingers like panicked thread. He clawed at the fractured streams of his soul, drawing upon every ounce of Aether he had left. He stitched wildly, blindly, like a butcher pretending to be a surgeon.

Ten threads of Aether. Ten desperate convergences anchored into the blood vessels of the eye.

He focused, breath trembling, pulse thundering in his ears.

Eleven hundred thousand. That was the number echoing in his mind—the number of nerve fibers in the human optic nerve. The number of threads he needed. The number of heartbeats he had to survive.

He used his heartbeat as rhythm. His soul as fuel. And from the pulsing Hearth in his chest, he sent forth Lifeblood—the blood of the soul—into the threads.

Each heartbeat was a sacrifice. A promise. A knife to his own soul.

One nerve. One beat.

Two nerves. Two beats.

Three. Four. A hundred. A thousand.

His skin withered. His veins turned translucent. The flesh clinging to his arms shrank, sunken like candle wax left too long in flame. His long red hair trembled... then whitened... then fell strand by strand, like snow melting in reverse.

Still, he wove. Still, he bled. Still, he reached for sight. But then—it shifted.

The eye in his socket trembled, then sucked.

Not Aether. Not threads.

It sucked Lifeblood—ravenous. Hungry. An unending drain pulling from his soul.

Zephyr gasped, body curling as agony returned tenfold.

"No—no, I’m almost done—!"

But the eye refused to stop it devoured him. His soul blood. His Aether. His will.

Zephyr’s limbs twitched. His consciousness blurred. All color vanished from his vision—both within and without—as the world slipped away.

’I’m going to die’. he realized. No out of fear. No out of panic. Just truth.

His lips moved one last time, whispering between ragged breaths.

"...Forgive me, Zephyr. My rebellion was crushed."

His vision narrowed to a pinprick.

He saw a shape crash through the forest—trees splintering like matchsticks. A figure landed beside him, gentle despite the force.

Merin.

She knelt, mouthed something—urgent.

But Zephyr never heard the words.

He closed his eye.

And the world went black.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Merin froze as she stared at the dying body in front of her. Skin so white it looked like chalk. His head bald with strands white hair all around. Veins so light it seems transparent.

But still his closed right eye shone a pale amethyst colour. It was like his right eye was bleeding but instead of red liquid, it was bleeding a pale transparent amethyst colour.

But that was non of her concern. She could see the mist, the mist that houses his soul. The former blaring red mist was now been consumed by the same soft amethyst of his eyes.

He was dying.

No.

He was almost gone.

Merin trembled. She hadn’t grasped a Law yet. She had no divine right, no power vast enough to counter what was happening.

But she knew someone who did.

"Magnus!!" she shouted to the trees, to the sky, to whatever realm he might be listening from. "Save him!"

No answer.

She moved quickly, fingers weaving Aether thread into cloth, drawing bandages from her pocket dimension. She wrapped them tight around his body.

"He’s just a child!" she cried. Her voice cracked, but her hands didn’t falter.

The parasite—that thing—was seventy percent done consuming his soul.

Still, silence.

"I will place an oath!" she screamed.

Nothing.

Eighty-five percent.

She knelt deeper into the dirt, tears nearly falling now.

"I beg you. He doesn’t deserve this!"

Ninety percent.

Then—she whispered, low and trembling:

"I will place an oath... on my True Name."

The world shifted.

An invisible ripple spread out from her chest, pushing the air, distorting the still air. It passed over Zephyr’s body and the devouring slowed—paused.

She exhaled a breath she didn’t know she was holding.

He’ll live. Magnus had heard her. He had to.

But something was wrong, she couldn’t sense any sign of life. Her eyes widened as she heard his ever beating hearth stop.

Cold revelation wrapped it’s icy claw around her throat— Magnus Law of ’No death’. Only worked on the living, it didn’t bring back the dead.

Zephyr Demios had passed away.

And that was it... No light

[And with that, the end of volume 1— That’s it.... No light]